"A persistent problem in education has been around how to improve schools where the majority of students are not meeting academic expectations. Under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) implemented in 2001, schools where students failed to meet adequate yearly progress for five consecutive years were given the options to: (1) close and reopen as a charter school, (2) close and reopen under the direction of an outside organization, (3) close and reopen under the direction of state emergency management, (4) begin the following year with a new principal and a large proportion of new staff, or (5) begin the following year with another major restructuring plan that included professional development, new curriculum, reduced class sizes, and other related interventions. For the most part, these choices of strategies remained as the school turnaround strategies until 2015 with the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). Overall these five strategies, prioritize interventions around the management of schools and fail to address student and teachers' local contexts and individual knowledge. The passage of ESSA allowed for an increased role of states to shape school turnaround policy and design new programs and approaches. This dissertation examines one such program in Michigan, the Blueprint for Strategic Reconfiguration. The Blueprint for Strategic Reconfiguration calls on districts to develop district-level and building-level networks to develop and implement a coordinated vision of high-quality instruction. Unlike previous initiatives, the Blueprint draws on improvement science principles to work to improve instruction at scale across a district. Improvement science aims to answer the question "what works, for whom, and under what set of conditions?" (Bryk et al., 2015. p. 14). According to improvement science, change occurs when local change agents engage in multiple cycles of improvement design, testing, and implementation (Bryk et al., 2011). In this dissertation, I examine this improvement science-based approach to school turnaround and improving instruction at scale across the district. In particular, I answer the following research questions: (1) What is the intended theory of change of the Blueprint for Systemic Reconfiguration for influencing instruction at scale?; (2) How does each administrator's orientation toward change influence the implementation of Blueprint for Systemic Reconfiguration in their district or school?; (3) How is the theory of change enacted in each district? How does this enactment reflect administrators' orientations toward change?; and (4) To what degree and in what ways does the enactment of the theory of change influence teacher instructional practices and planning in each school? This embedded case study examines observational data from district leadership networks (n=2), school leadership networks (n=4), and teacher classrooms (n=44) as well as interview data from district superintendents (n=2), building principals (n=40, and teachers (n=44). It also drew on fall and spring teacher surveys regarding their reading instructional practices, collaboration opportunities, planning practices, and school environment. Results show: (1) the Blueprint is built on improvement science principles; (2) superintendents and principals have different orientation toward the change process, which typically fall into experimental science assumptions and improvement science assumptions; (3) the superintendent and principals' orientation toward the change process influenced both the design and implementation of the Blueprint in their district and building; and (4) these different orientations toward change and the differing implementation strategies influenced teacher implementation of the district mandated literacy program."--Pages ii-iii.
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